The influence of non-functional requirements in UCP method on the accuracy of effort estimates

The Use Case Point method of effort estimation in software projects quantifies project size based on both functional and non-functional requirements. The latter ones are hard to assess and therefore often neglected. This paper presents a methodology for assessing the influence of non-functional requirements on the overall estimate. Two data sets of software projects are used for comparing the correlation between unadjusted and adjusted use case weights. Based on the results, the guidelines for software development effort estimation are concluded.